I like Mark Twain. I don’t think I appreciate his work to the tune of $18,000 –– I’d prefer a recent paperback. But I find entertainment from Twain’s humor, and I am interested in his life, so the book caught my attention among many listed at www.BaumanRareBooks.com.

I found the website after reading an advertisement for Bauman on the back page of the Book Review section in the New York Times.

Less costly books were listed there, too. You can buy “Winston Churchill: World War II and Post-War Speeches, 1941-61” for only $8,000. I know that still sounds like a hefty price, but you get 12 heavy volumes in the deal. Churchill apparently talked a lot.

President’s seem to sell, too. I don’t know if they get bought, but prices have been put on them. A first edition of Barack Obama’s “Audacity of Hope,” published in 2006 and signed by the president, is listed at $4,500.

A president’s writing doesn’t even have to be a book to appear valuable to collectors. A signed copy of former President Jimmy Carter’s 2002 Nobel Peace Prize lecture is being sold by Bauman for $400. A signed proclamation President Harry Truman issued at the Nazi surrender during World War II is priced at $25,000. An original Civil War military commission for Lt. Nelson Bronson, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, is being sold for the same price.

Typed letters “with Rough Riders archive 1898-1918,” signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, can be collected for $42,500. It’s correspondence came from Samuel Weller, one of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. With the letters, you also would get Weller’s Rough Rider uniform and a photograph showing Weller wearing the garments. I’m assuming they’ve been washed.

Volume of interest

Still, books are Bauman’s main interest, and the Mark Twain book was a major interest of mine.

Oh, I wouldn’t mind owning A.A. Milne’s “When We Were Very Young,” if I had $25,000 to spend on something that would just sit on my living room bookcase until I was very old.

And I could see myself leafing through a $16,000 “earliest obtainable edition” of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” wondering how many adventures I’d have to tear off and sell, page by page, in order to pay the utility bills.

The old “Huckleberry Finn” novel, however, is definitely my favorite.

“It’s the best book we’ve had. All-American writing comes from that. There is nothing before. There has been nothing since,” novelist Ernest Hemingway once reviewed.

The Bauman website claims that this particular edition of Twain’s work is one of the best of its kind.

“This copy has all the commonly identified first-issue points (the printer assembled copies haphazardly; bibliographers do not yet agree as to the priority of many points.”

The explanatory text then went on to list all the mistakes in the original edition that have been identified in this particular book.

Typos? Misspellings? Mistakes in captions of illustrations?

The person buying this “Huckleberry Finn” probably should try not to think that he’s paying $18,000 for something that the original purchaser probably sent back to the publisher to get a new copy.

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